Newsletter November 2024: A New Project

Compared to last month, this month I did some programming in my spare time. I had fewer commitments, and my mind started thinking about various programming projects. We also got the first snowfall of the season and I got to enjoy a run in it:

A New Code Editor

The programming project that I started working on is code editor that is a mix of a text editor and a structured editor. It is all text, but parsers and pretty printers allow you to work with a tree structure and not think too much about syntax. The code is available on GitHub, and here is what it looks like when editing a JSON document:

I got the idea for this project when trying out Black. Black automatically formats Python code for you so that you don't have to think about it. I've been interested in structured editors for some time, but my feeling is that they are not user friendly because they limit what you can type. Then I came up with this idea of an editor that constantly parses what you type. If the parse is successful, it pretty prints it for you and provides you with edit operations on the AST. But it is all still just text, so you can type whatever. In the worst case, the parse fails and you have to fix it manually.

So far, it looks quite promising. And most importantly, I'm having fun experimenting. The most likely scenario is that the project will not be a success, but I will learn something and have fun doing so. But you never know. One day, one of these projects just might turn into something that is invaluable.

TDD

This month I also watched a presentation by Kent Beck called TDD: Theme & Variations. For me, it was a nice refresher on the origins of TDD.

One thing that I appreciate with TDD, that I partially had forgotten, is how it reduces anxiety. Kent reminded me of it in the presentation. When all tests are passing and you can't think of any more tests to write, you are done, and you know that it works. That reduces anxiety a lot.